Your Side Hustle Isn't About Money—It's Your Career Insurance Policy

I used to think side hustles were for people who couldn't make enough money at their "real" job. You know, the Uber drivers funding their startup dreams or the teachers selling crafts on Etsy to pay rent.

I was wrong. Dead wrong.

The story of Nehal Solaiman—a clinical pharmacist who built a nutrition coaching business while on pandemic leave—completely flipped my understanding of what a side business actually is. It's not about desperation or grinding for extra cash. It's about something much more strategic: testing whether you can build a career around solving problems that actually matter to you.

The Problem with "Following Your Passion"

Everyone tells you to "follow your passion," but what if your passion emerged from your biggest struggle? Nehal didn't wake up one day dreaming of becoming a nutrition coach. She was a pregnant pharmacist dealing with gestational diabetes and thyroid issues, trying to figure out how to get healthy without starving herself.

When she successfully managed her condition through nutrition—and delivered a healthy baby—she'd accidentally discovered something powerful: a problem she could solve that actually mattered.

Here's what's brilliant about this approach: she wasn't chasing some abstract passion. She was chasing a solution that worked for her, then wondering if it might work for others too.

Why Healthcare Professionals Make Unexpected Entrepreneurs

Nehal's background as a pharmacist might seem unrelated to nutrition coaching, but it's actually her secret weapon. She understands the science but realized something crucial was missing from traditional healthcare: the art of helping people actually change.

"I didn't want to just hand them a paper and send them home," she said. This is the gap that creates opportunities—not just in healthcare, but everywhere. The space between knowing what should happen and making it actually happen.

Think about your own field. What do you see that works in theory but falls apart in practice? What do clients or customers struggle with that your industry treats as "their problem"? That's where side businesses are born.

The Pandemic Pivot That Wasn't Really About the Pandemic

Yes, Nehal took leave during COVID because she didn't want to bring the virus home to her one-year-old. But let's be honest—the pandemic just gave her permission to do something she was probably already thinking about.

How many of us used COVID as an excuse to finally try something we'd been putting off? The pandemic became this convenient external reason to make changes we knew we needed to make anyway.

Starting with her sister-in-law wasn't some brilliant marketing strategy. It was just the path of least resistance. But here's what's smart about it: she proved her approach worked before she tried to scale it. Her sister-in-law lost 30 pounds in three months without feeling deprived—that's a case study, not just a success story.

The Real Business Model: Solving Problems You Understand

Nehal's "recipe for success" isn't rocket science, but it's something most businesses get wrong. She takes a whole-person approach because she knows firsthand that weight issues aren't just about food. They're about sleep, stress, emotional eating, and a dozen other factors that diet culture ignores.

She uses WhatsApp for daily check-ins. She schedules two Zoom calls per month. She personalizes everything. This isn't innovative technology—it's just paying attention to what people actually need instead of what's easiest to deliver.

Six months later, she had 10 regular clients. That's not unicorn growth, but it's sustainable growth. And sustainability matters more than you think when you're testing whether something could eventually replace your day job.

The Side Hustle as Career Insurance

Here's where most people get side hustles wrong: they think it's about the extra income. But for someone like Nehal—a clinical pharmacist with a solid career—the money isn't the point. The learning is.

She's essentially running a real-world experiment: Can I build something meaningful that solves problems I care about? Can I make people's lives better in a way that also supports my own life? Can I create work that feels more aligned with who I am?

If the answer is yes, then the side hustle becomes career insurance. It's proof that you can create value outside the traditional system. It's evidence that your skills translate beyond your current role. It's a bridge to something different if you ever want to cross it.

What This Means for the Rest of Us

You don't need to be a healthcare professional to apply Nehal's approach. You just need to pay attention to problems you've solved for yourself that other people are still struggling with.

Maybe you figured out how to manage remote teams during the pandemic. Maybe you developed a system for learning new skills while working full-time. Maybe you found a way to maintain relationships while traveling constantly for work.

The expertise you take for granted might be exactly what someone else needs. And testing that theory doesn't require quitting your job or betting everything on an uncertain outcome.

The Questions Worth Asking

Before you start brainstorming business ideas or researching market opportunities, ask yourself these questions:

What problems have you solved in your own life that your friends keep asking you about?

What part of your current job do you find most fulfilling—and what part feels like a waste of your talents?

If you could help people with one specific challenge, what would it be?

What would you need to prove to yourself before you'd consider making a bigger career change?

The Long Game

Nehal plans to return to pharmacy but continue coaching on the side. Eventually, she hopes coaching becomes her main job and pharmacy becomes the side gig. That's a 10-year plan, not a 10-month plan.

This is how real career transitions work. Not dramatic overnight transformations, but gradual shifts that reduce risk while increasing alignment with what matters to you.

Your side hustle doesn't have to become your main thing. But it should teach you something about what your main thing could become. And in a world where career security is increasingly uncertain, that knowledge might be the most valuable thing you can build.

So what problem are you uniquely positioned to solve? And what's stopping you from testing whether other people would pay you to help them solve it too?